Wax Statues
by Do Wop
Summary: There's more to Miss Goldenweek than you might think. Mr. 3 x Miss Goldenweek


Miss Goldenweek dipped her paintbrush on her palette, and removed it coated with a deep red color. She brought the brush up to the statue's surface, and then hesitated for a moment. Was it the right color? She held the brush up at eye level for a moment and considered. No, she decided. It needed way more brown. She returned the brush to the palette, and began mixing the colors until she got the exact shade she wanted.

She loved painting. It was one of the few things that she could do for hours on end and never get bored of. She just dipped her brush, made some easy brushstrokes over a piece of canvas-or flag, or statue, or whatever it was that she was painting on that day-and brought something new to life.

Back before she had joined Baroque Works, her art had been a hit in galleries all across the Grand Line. Her work went for hundreds of thousands of Beli at auction, and her best piece had actually netted more than a million. The critics were all in agreement: she was a prodigy, with not just an exceptional level of talent, but also a maturity in her technique and composition that was almost unprecedented in a child her age.

She, of course, kept silent about why that was.

Devil Fruit abilities were generally famous for being flashy, obvious things. Stretching, exploding, turning into sand...when you saw them in action you knew immediately that you were dealing with a Devil Fruit user. Not so her own talents. You could work with her for years and never know that she had eaten a Devil Fruit at all, which was exactly the way she wanted it.

Six years ago, she had eaten a strange fruit that she had purchased at the market. The poor merchant clearly hadn't even known what he was selling. If he had, he would have demanded a much higher price.

She took the fruit home and ate it. She almost immediately began to feel odd, like she was going to be sick. She bent double and closed her eyes to try and block the feeling out.

When her eyes opened again, her perspective had been shifted down several feet, and her clothes were far, far too big for her.

After a panicked half hour, she worked out what had just happened to her. She'd eaten the Chibi Chibi no Mi, and been transformed into a six-year-old child. Once she'd figured that out, it was child's play to figure out how to turn back to her forty-six-year-old self, and into the hybrid twenty-six-year-old form.

She could have just continued to live out her life as before. It wouldn't have been hard; The only real change would have been that deep water would now be taboo, but she'd never been overly fond of swimming.

Instead, she decided to make the most of her new abilities, and became a child full-time. It could be limiting, sure, but it also had advantages. To a child, life was much more _intense_. Feelings, sights, sounds...all of it felt raw, felt more vibrant.

Invoking the devil fruit's power didn't just give her the body of a child; She became a child entirely, complete with this new perspective on life. But because she was also old, she could see and recognize what she was feeling, tempering it with reason and experience. It was exhilarating. Nobody ever appreciates the way it feels when they are a child, and by the time you reach adulthood your memory of it has faded.

There was absolutely no way that she was going to miss out on something like that.

And that is why she could recognize with perfect clarity what she was feeling as she made the final brush stroke on Mr. 3's wax statue. It was nothing by an adult's standards, just a silly little girl's crush, but to her younger self(now twelve years old) it felt like the most important thing in the world.

"I warned you," Mr. 3 said apologetically. "I'm not very good at making statues of people."

Miss Goldenweek stepped back to have a look at their creation. True, it wasn't as perfect as Mr. 3's other works. The legs were a little too long, and the heads a little too small, and the hands were very poorly defined. But despite these flaws-or perhaps because of them-she liked it more than anything else he had sculpted.

It was a statue of Mr. 3 and Miss Goldenweek, holding hands.

"It's perfect!" she shouted with glee, embracing him tightly. "Thanks, Mr. 3!"

She stood up on tiptoe and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

"It's no problem," Mr. 3 said, scratching his head, "but I'm still not sure I understand why you wanted to make this so badly."

He shrugged. It would probably remain a mystery forever.  



End file.
